1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the design of web-based applications. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and apparatus for facilitating client-side data-management for web-based applications.
2. Related Art
During operation, many web-based applications access significant amounts of data. Because of resource constraints and other concerns, a web-server that hosts a web-based application typically stores and maintains this data, which allows the client-side portion of the web-based application to remain relatively “stateless.” This causes the web-based application to perform many actions sub-optimally because additional processing power and bandwidth is required to maintain client-specific data at the web-server instead of on the client.
One solution to the above problem is to use “cookies” to store data on the client. However, this technique has limitations. First, cookies can only store a limited amount of data, which limits their usefulness for applications which store significant amounts of data. Second, many users are suspicious of cookies, and therefore do not permit cookies to be stored on their local client systems. Furthermore, clients often do not store cookies persistently beyond a limited time-period, which reduces the usefulness of cookies for storing data for web-based applications which a user accesses often.
Hence, what is needed is a method and apparatus for managing client-side data for web-based applications without the above-described problems.